What is the essence of D&D

[Nagol]

No, he was asking who kept the wizard from dying to mooks in combat.

Oh! The party fought in its entire. That said, the Wizard was something of a paranoid and wasted a lot of power keeping defensive spells up when they probably weren't necessary.

Do Fighters and Rogues have value? Of course, I never meant to imply they don't. It's just that they literally cannot replace the spellcasters and succeed at the same range of missions. With care and forethought, spellcasters can get through reasonably short missions leaning on assets like defensive spells, summons and conjures, or hit and run tactics much more easily than the game allows non spellcasters to replace magic.

Part of the problem is in the more recent (3.5+) editions of the game, great care has gone into making certain all the classes are capable in the combat pillar. So dropping all non caster and replacing them with caster will change tactics, but maintain capability.

No such care has be given to other aspects of the game so travel, survival, and exploration are hard hit by the removal of magic.

 

[Zardnaar]

I never told anyone what their opinion is. I told people that certain aspects of their complaints are based on objectively false premises.

The powers do different things in play. That's fact. They make the classes play differently in a fight, or in the case of utility powers, give very different tool kits outside of combat, even to two classes with similar skill lists. Rangers and Rogues just fight and overcome obstacles differently, even if they choose the same skill set. They are objectively more different from round to round or challenge to challenge than most non spellcasters are without using magic items to define your character in other editions. Fighters and rogues have never been more different from eachother in any other edition of dnd. Same Wizards and Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids, Fighters and Barbarians, War Clerics and Paladins. The list goes on until you run out of class that have been in previous editions.

Beyond that, a single target pure striker melee rogue is practically a different class from a secondary control, multi-target focused, dagger thrower or shortbow rogue. They simply do entirely different things.

The fact you didn't see any of that somehow doesn't make it not the case. You just missed it.

Which again, leads into what I said earlier. 4e divided the fan base in spite of commercially doing fine and still being the top of the RPG market, and being the edition during which the surge in DnD popularity in general started, because of presentation more than any other single factor.

The essence of DnD for many people is largely "look and feel", and familiarity of player options upon quick perusal. Hell, even I balked the first time I played it, until I actually had a DM that had read the DMG and understood how the game works. He was, ironically, an old 2e DM, and understood it as a game to be run about the same as how he'd always run 2e, with the addition of actual mechanics for everyone outside of combat, and everyone having something to do that was less samey than "I hit several times with my sword" in combat.

It wasn't too dog Pathfinder beat it. RPG market shrank. Objective facts.

5E started the revival, Pathfinder and OSR kept the torch burning.

Pathfinder sales tanked around 5E release, PFS objectively collapsed in a lot of areas.

 

[Nagol]

D&D is a team based game, that's the essence of it.
3E had it's issues, in most games I didn't see magic invalidate the other PCs although the Druid was close. It was overpowered sure but you could still have fun it was harder than say 2E. And that power level is goneburger.

OSR can't buy magic items, 3E and 4E disagreed but 3Evat least resembled 2E and could be played similar (alot if players were crap at buying items it's not fun).

It may be team-based, but he who can, will call the tune. If people want to explore the shipwreck, but the caster doesn't want to prep/cast waterbreathing then the group will do something else! If the caster wants to go home and moral suasion cannot convince him otherwise then either the group goes or it lives without the caster. If the group decides its had enough and expels the caster then it still cannot do what the caster didn't want to do.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Oh! The party fought in its entire. That said, the Wizard was something of a paranoid and wasted a lot of power keeping defensive spells up when they probably weren't necessary.

Do Fighters and Rogues have value? Of course, I never meant to imply they don't. It's just that they literally cannot replace the spellcasters and succeed at the same range of missions. With care and forethought, spellcasters can get through reasonably short missions leaning on assets like defensive spells, summons and conjures, or hit and run tactics much more easily than the game allows non spellcasters to replace magic.

Part of the problem is in the more recent (3.5+) editions of the game, great care has gone into making certain all the classes are capable in the combat pillar. So dropping all non caster and replacing them with caster will change tactics, but maintain capability.

No such care has be given to other aspects of the game so travel, survival, and exploration are hard hit by the removal of magic.

Ok, my turn for an anecdote (extremely abbreviated): the party had to turn a winch to raise a portcullis while being attacked by waves of mooks. This required Athletics rolls, ideally from two characters simultaneously, with penalties on the rolls if they took damage while trying.

How would a party of Wizards have done this?

Point being: if you want to craft adventures such that they can only be completed with the presence of some classes, you can craft adventures that can only be completed with the presence of some classes.

 

[Oofta]

I never told anyone what their opinion is. I told people that certain aspects of their complaints are based on objectively false premises.

The powers do different things in play. That's fact. They make the classes play differently in a fight, or in the case of utility powers, give very different tool kits outside of combat, even to two classes with similar skill lists. Rangers and Rogues just fight and overcome obstacles differently, even if they choose the same skill set. They are objectively more different from round to round or challenge to challenge than most non spellcasters are without using magic items to define your character in other editions. Fighters and rogues have never been more different from eachother in any other edition of dnd. Same Wizards and Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids, Fighters and Barbarians, War Clerics and Paladins. The list goes on until you run out of class that have been in previous editions.

Beyond that, a single target pure striker melee rogue is practically a different class from a secondary control, multi-target focused, dagger thrower or shortbow rogue. They simply do entirely different things.

The fact you didn't see any of that somehow doesn't make it not the case. You just missed it.

Which again, leads into what I said earlier. 4e divided the fan base in spite of commercially doing fine and still being the top of the RPG market, and being the edition during which the surge in DnD popularity in general started, because of presentation more than any other single factor.

The essence of DnD for many people is largely "look and feel", and familiarity of player options upon quick perusal. Hell, even I balked the first time I played it, until I actually had a DM that had read the DMG and understood how the game works. He was, ironically, an old 2e DM, and understood it as a game to be run about the same as how he'd always run 2e, with the addition of actual mechanics for everyone outside of combat, and everyone having something to do that was less samey than "I hit several times with my sword" in combat.

TLDR version: I'm right and you are not entitled to your opinion.

Have a good one.

 

[Nagol]

Ok, my turn for an anecdote (extremely abbreviated): the party had to turn a winch to raise a portcullis while being attacked by waves of mooks. This required Athletics rolls, ideally from two characters simultaneously, with penalties on the rolls if they took damage while trying.

How would a party of Wizards have done this?

Point being: if you want to craft adventures such that they can only be completed with the presence of some classes, you can craft adventures that can only be completed with the presence of some classes.

Summon 2 earth elementasl to turn and a wall of stone to keep out the mooks.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It wasn't too dog Pathfinder beat it. RPG market shrank. Objective facts.

5E started the revival, Pathfinder and OSR kept the torch burning.

Pathfinder sales tanked around 5E release, PFS objectively collapsed in a lot if areas.

Um, no. 4e outsold Pathfinder in every quarter until after Next was announced and they stopped publishing new 4e stuff.

The revival started around the time Aquisitions Inc got big, which was well before the Next playtest was announced. Hell, before Essentials, IIRC.

The torch never needed PF or OSR to keep burning, also. More people kept playing with their old DnD books than played either of those.

At it's height, DDi subscriptions probably outdid PF book sales. Why do I say that? Because even at the low point during the Next playtest, DDi still had nearly 100k subs. Even if they all had 1 year subs, which were at a very generous discount, they were raking in gobs of cash from that service. At the height of 4e, when DDi was still the place to get new Dragon and Dungeon mag articles on top of the builder and compendium, it was much larger than that.

Everything other than DnD is like every campaign setting other than homebrew in popularity. You have to discount the top dog to even call them popular with a straight face. And now 4e is lumped in with everything else behind 5e in places like roll20, but before the playtest was announced, nothing was beating it.

 

[Zardnaar]

It may be team-based, but he who can, will call the tune. If people want to explore the shipwreck, but the caster doesn't want to prep/cast waterbreathing then the group will do something else! If the caster wants to go home and moral suasion cannot convince him otherwise then either the group goes or it lives without the caster. If the group decides its had enough and expels the caster then it still cannot do what the caster didn't want to do.

Diving suits don't exist in the D&D world. Diving wreck adventures usually provide a way to get underwater if required via NPCs or a water breathing plant you eat.

 

[Zardnaar]

Summon 2 earth elelmental to turn and a wall of stone to keep out the mooks.

Only if high enough level, you don't get surprised or grappled or you lose initiative.
I lost a level 19 archmage to trolls in second Ed.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Summon 2 earth elelmental to turn and a wall of stone to keep out the mooks.

It was a low-level adventure.

Also, you're assuming the casters (all three of them, because those are concentration spells) happen to have those spells selected. Can I choose which magic items my team of Fighters happens to have when faced with your challenge?